A boxy little ancient Audi compact, its paint faded to leprous gray and rusting through in big patches like scabs, had cut in to the curb close behind her. The fat round shape of an RPG warhead pointed at her from the rear passenger window. White smoke rushed out around it. Garish yellow flame lit the car’s interior.
The high-explosives-stuffed metal onion sprang toward Annja’s face.
5
Annja hurled herself to the right. Thirty feet to her left the rocket grenade cracked off against the corner of a building. The floor-level window, almost totally obscured with hand bills, exploded in big shards of glass and scraps of colorful flaming paper.
She hit the pavement, skinned the palms of her hands, got a shoulder down, and rolled over and over.
Demonic shrieking rose over the plaza, which had abruptly gone so quiet Annja momentarily thought the blast’s vicious crack had deafened her. She rolled on her side into the gutter and looked back.
Yellow flames completely filled the little car and rolled out the windows in big gushes. The front passenger’s door was open. A blazing figure had staggered out into the street, waving wings of flame. A man threw a jacket over his head and bodychecked him to the ground.
Picking herself up to a crouch Annja looked quickly around. People were standing and gaping. Some were screaming, while others ran in various directions. People thronged around the unfortunate victims of the blast’s overkill, trying to tend to them.
The Audi’s gas tank exploded and a gout of orange flame shot out from beneath it in all directions, driving back would-be rescuers. At least two people were still inside the car, the driver and the shooter. Annja wasn’t sure it would be any favor to extract them—if they were even still alive in that crematory.
The crew in the Audi must be newbies, Annja thought, looking to make their bones with Bajraktari’s gang. She figured they’d decided to show initiative and really impress their bosses by making a splashy hit on her. No doubt the survivors would find they had succeeded. Their bosses would have the unbreakable impression they were idiots.
Even aside from the little problem of the flaming rocket’s backblast—which never caused a bit of problem in the movies—the RPG was a pretty goofy weapon for a targeted hit on an individual anyway. Scanning her surroundings for signs of attack from a different direction, Annja felt a flash of bemusement. Where along the way did I become an expert in the specs and subtleties of deployment of the rocket-propelled grenade launcher?
Nobody was paying Annja any attention as she got upright, a little creakily. She was going to have a nasty bruise on her hip, and her skin almost crawled with the need to pick out the grit and wash the foul gutter goo off her skinned hands. There was no way for anyone to see she had been the rocket’s target. She was just another unfortunate passerby who was lucky enough to possess good reflexes.
But the comforting anonymity didn’t last. Through the shouting, milling throng she spotted two men in long black greatcoats, open and flapping about their trouser legs, hard faces scruffily unshaved even by the standards of Greek anarchists. The none-too-subtle way they held their hands in their coats and swiveled their heads before their burning crow-dark eyes fixed on Annja showed that, as she feared, the hapless crew in the car had backup. And more seasoned backup, by the looks of it.
She headed down the street that led away from the plaza, toward the Acropolis hill and downtown Athens. She made herself walk, though at a good pace with her long legs. She wasn’t concerned about attracting the gangsters’ attention—they had spotted their prey already. She just didn’t want anyone else to associate her with them, nor to have any reason to remember her at all.
Fortunately the crowd had plenty of distractions. Pedestrians wounded by the rocket blast were being tended. The Audi was wholly engulfed in flames and burning with a noise like a gale blowing down a narrow street, attracting a lot of gawkers. A knot of men surrounded the would-be assassin who had escaped the inferno. They had completely covered him in coats, smothering the flames. Now they jostled each other to kick the unmoving figure, leaving open the question of whether they had saved him from burning to death out of Samaritanism or simply the desire to kill him themselves.
The only people paying attention to Annja, it seemed, were her personal hunters.
The few other people Annja saw were hurrying toward the plaza to see what the excitement was about. She broke into a run. An alley opened to her left. She turned into it.
Once off the street she accelerated into a full-on sprint.
The alley reeked of fish, vegetables and coffee grounds decomposing into the black greasy muck that slimed its floor and made footing tricky.
She reached the end of the short block and dodged left again. This street was narrow and deserted.
She waited. In a moment she heard the footsteps pounding along the alley.
She knew the very last thing on their minds was that their quarry, a mere woman, a soft, weak, Western infidel at that, would do anything but flee like a frightened rabbit until she collapsed of exhaustion.
As the footfalls grew louder she closed her eyes and summoned her sword from the other where. A tall dark figure flashed into view. She swung for the fences.
The edge of the sword was extremely sharp. Annja twisted with her hips and put everything she had into the cut. Subtle technique was not an issue here.
The blade caught the running man at the Adam’s apple. In a flash he was tumbling into a loose-limbed sprawl.
His partner came a few steps behind. He tried to brake himself. Annja pivoted around the rough stone corner of the wall and, still grasping the hilt with both hands, plunged the sword into his belly to the cross-shaped hilt.
Her pursuer’s mouth and eyes flew wide.
Annja stepped to her left. She released the sword. It vanished. Blood spurted from the assassin’s wounds as he fell.
Annja walked away with hands in her jacket pockets as if nothing had happened.
She hoped no one had witnessed the events. But experience had taught her that didn’t necessarily matter. Telling skeptical and generally short-fused police they had seen a female American tourist pull a broadsword out of nowhere and kill two gun-armed terrorists, then made the lengthy weapon utterly vanish wasn’t a good move.
Cops the world around had ways of dealing with people who told stories like that. None of them was pleasant. And Greek cops weren’t renowned for their restraint or regard for human rights.
Annja’s heart raced. So did her mind. She was trying to sort out what had just happened—or what lay behind what just happened, and what that meant for her future survival.
Clearly, Enver Bajraktari was highly vexed with Annja.
It was possible, she thought, the carload of newbies had been sacrifices. Pawns chosen to noisily and splashily die, attracting the attention of everyone, most especially their intended victim, to give the real kill team a clear shot at her.
It was a good plan, too, she had to admit. It would’ve worked if Annja’s recent life experiences hadn’t given her the awareness and paranoid suspicion of an alley cat.
She came to a wider street, filled with tourists and locals far enough from the Exarcheia plaza not to have noticed the commotion yet, although sirens had started to go off and a pillar of black smoked undulated up into the sky. Those events were remote enough that most of them shrugged and went about their business.
Gratefully, Annja joined them.
6
“There was some excitement down in Exarcheia today,” Pan Katramados said across a spoonful of soup he was raising to his lips. The candle in its bronze bowl in the middle of the table underlit his face in such a way as to make him look quite ferocious.